he installment of Witchfinder will be late. Oh, not by a day, probably no more than a few hours. But it’s all good (other than the snow which meant I lost most of the day doing shopping/errands that should have taken a couple of hours.) Update: Okay, definitely by 5 pm Eastern MOUNTAIN time — says she who must wrap. And if you want to know why — gahhh kids, cats, post office. This week is very bad. I promise this won’t happen again.)

This shift means a clean up and a change that will make it easier for you to follow the posts.

Here’s what’s happening — and this is part of the “editorial commentary.” When I write, I do it in a sort of trance. You know the thing about being mostly plotter, but a little bit pantser? Well, what this means is that lots of things drop into my plots that I hadn’t meant, and others were in the plot all along, but shift position/fall into position as I write.

The result is that about a third of the way through the book, I’ll have accumulated enough errors that I need to go back and make the narrative coherent before I can power through to the end. I’ve reached that point now, so I’m doing my “first edit” in which I clean up incoherent plot signaling, bits of worldbuilding that stick out and that sort of thing. It is by no means the final edit, but it gets the novel tow here there’s some sort of coherent story I can follow.

Reading over the novel also allows me to see where pieces fit that I hadn’t figured out when outlining. Like… the lion boy. I know who he is, and what part he plays now, other than being a rescued kid. Same with the elves, which dropped in without being in the outline (but which answered “who is Gabriel Penn?”)

I now have a fully marked paper manuscript up to this point, but need to enter the changes and post, which will take a couple of hours.

Also, on the “mechanical” level, it has occurred to me posting a work this length makes it come across as very fractured and difficult to follow. I’m going to take a page from the Dwiggie website, where I post fanfiction, and take all chapters up to this point and “archive” them in a “page” where you can read them consecutively and more easily. This makes my life easier too, allowing me to link only one chapter every week.

Of course, once the book is ready to go up that free version will probably be taken down. Or not. Depends on how much final “clean up” I do, and how different the end is from that version, in which case I might leave that version up as advertisement. We shall see. At any rate, the page will make this easier to read and easier for me to post.

I promise to have a new chapter up by midday, as well as the archive live. I’d like to promise you a new cover too, but miracles have limits and I still have sinfully late gifts to ship and the family gifts to wrap.

3 responses to “Witchfinder Delay”

The *last* time you asked for a time-extending machine, Rex Mason converted the Men’s room into a water-powered time machine. We spent *weeks* restoring the temporal continuum and all the guy had to use the outhouse out back.

Now, I *do* know a group in Texas that has perfected the “time-wasting machine” but that’s a different story!

Thank you for the edits, and for the reformat. I’m totally digging the story but the pace (a chapter a week) makes it hard to follow, at least for me. Its like trying to read while your 10 year old keeps interrupting you. “Dad, Dad. Look what I did on my computer game.” I’d be tempted to stop reading it, picking it up when its complete, but darn it if I can’t stop reading it anyway.

I would settle for a “time-out” closet, where I could settle in for a nap (or a full night’s sleep, or a little reading … okay, a LOT of reading) and return to the continuum right where I had been before going to “time-out.”

And while I’m swiping from Dr Who I wouldn’t mind a T.A.R.D.I.S. book case, a tidy little Victorian shelf wherein I could store all my books, records, tapes (audio & video), CDs, DVD,s … and maybe a toy chest, with robot accessory to collect stray Lego blocks.